


The Fun

by ForASecondThereWedWon



Series: Oh my god, they were checkmates... [12]
Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Bickering, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, First Time Blow Jobs, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Resolved Sexual Tension, Sexual Tension, Unsafe Sex, Vaginal Fingering, deviates from canon in ep. 6: Adjournment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:40:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28117077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon
Summary: Sleeping through Benny's friends' visit in "Adjournment," Beth misses out on some of the fun. But not all of it.
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Series: Oh my god, they were checkmates... [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2020483
Comments: 25
Kudos: 281





	The Fun

**Author's Note:**

> _We’re holding hands, inches apart/Show me the way to his faraway heart_ \- The Chordettes

“You’re _sure_ though?” Benny asks, as if her choosing to go to bed when tired is as seriously ill-advised a decision as that doomed jaunt of Napoleon’s.

“ _Yes_ , Benny,” Beth sighs. She claps a hand to his shoulder, the way he’s always doing to her. “Good _night_.”

It’s the last she hears of him or much else until she stirs awake some amount of time later. Whatever she’s lying on doesn’t have the firm wobble she expects her usual air mattress shares with the flesh of a walrus; she’s in Benny’s bed. That’s _right_ , he surrendered it to her out of some impulse towards compassion that he must keep habitually suppressed. His bedroom is the only room in the apartment with a door (besides the bathroom) and he had people coming over. People she was too tired to conjecture about the importance of when he attempted to trick her into a round of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, or whatever the fuck the Benny Watts version is. Beth doesn’t hear voices now. Maybe they left. Maybe the sound of the door closing was what woke her.

No, there’s a closer sound.

She manages to roll onto her side before getting her eyes open—the yellow glow of a lamp in the room with her discourages the latter. The closer sound turns out to be Benny taking off his shirt.

“I can’t believe you slept through it,” he tells her when he sees she’s got her eyes open.

“What are you doing?”

“I got Levertov here for you!”

“Who’s Levertov?”

“Yeah, he’s a friend,” Benny goes on, disregarding her question, “but still, I pulled the string, arranged for you to have an evening with a Grandmaster.”

“What are you talking about?”

She yawns.

“ _Chess_ , Beth. What do you think I’m talking about?”

“Honestly, all of that sounded like you were trying to pimp me out to your friend.”

“Can you be funny without being funny about sex? I just… I try very hard not to…” Beth watches him quizzically as he unbuckles his belt.

“Include me and sex in the same thought? And yet here you are, about to take your pants off and presumably climb into bed with me,” she says with a regal wave of her hand.

He releases the ends of the belt and leaves them dangling.

“I was going to sleep on the air mattress, ok? I thought you were out cold, so I was changing in here for the sake of convenience. My pajamas are in here—”

“Huh, and I always imagined you slept in the nude. That is _not_ a mystery I thought you were going to let me solve.”

Benny’s posture somehow goes from still to stiller.

“Beth.”

“Don’t worry,” she says, “I know how to defuse these moments with you.” She looks at him seriously, making a real effort to open her eyes fully. “Benny, I would never imagine you sleeping in anything but pajamas. Yep, I can picture them. I like your pajamas.”

Apparently, she’s exasperated him, because he storms out of the room with what appear to be his actual pajamas clutched in his hand. Beth listens for a minute, rolling onto her back again. He left the bedroom door open. _That_ noise could be his pants hitting the ground.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” she asks, raising her voice and her head from the pillow.

Benny walks back in like he’s returning from war—with himself. His hands are on his hips and his mouth is screwed up as though he’s doing something against his better judgement. What a baby. If he arranged the night she missed for her sake, then he wants her to know about it. He’d be punishing himself as much as her if he withheld the recap.

“Did you play chess?” Beth prompts in a slow voice.

“Yeah.”

“Did you _win_?”

“Of course I won. I’d never go easy on a friend.”

“Don’t I know it,” she remarks dryly.

“We talked about you,” he finally shares. “I, specifically, talked about you.”

“In what way?”

“I said you were the most intuitive goddamn player I’ve ever seen. I talked about your endgames, how you close in on your opponent from all sides, like iron filings to a magnet.”

“You couldn’t have praised me like that while I was awake?”

“You couldn’t have just stayed up?” He sighs. “No, Beth, I couldn’t say it when you were awake because I know how I come off.”

She smiles slyly.

“Like a fan?”

“Like a fucking disciple,” Benny corrects. “I know I do. Cleo’s smug look while I was talking told me as much.”

“Well, I don’t know who Cleo is or what you’re so scared of, but I think you’ve earned yourself some warm blankets.”

Beth flips the bedding down invitingly. He looks from the empty space beside her to her face with a kind of plea in his dark eyes.

“That’s exactly what I’m scared of,” he says softly. He makes a broad gesture with his arm. “I played the boys tonight and I felt like you were looking over my shoulder, seeing the moves faster, choosing better ones than everything I came up with.”

“But you won.”

“But not against _you_ ,” Benny emphasizes. “In my head. I swear, you were giving me this _look_ , this killer look, and I was a fucking deer in the headlights.”

“Did you freeze up?”

“What?” He blinks and refocuses on her.

“Freeze up,” Beth repeats. “People do that sometimes, when I play them. I advance fast from the start and they get spooked.”

“No, I didn’t freeze up, I played faster than I ever have.”

“But not better?” she asks carefully. She’s confused here.

“Yes, better, definitely better.”

She wonders if his feet are getting cold standing there. It’s inconsiderate of him not to just crawl in next to her; she’d like to pull the blankets back up, but not appear as though she’s rescinding the proposition.

“So, what was wrong?”

“I was furious at this you—”

“The me in your head.”

“—for, for fucking humbling me in front of fucking Levertov.”

“Who you beat,” Beth reminds him.

Benny’s shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath as she looks on.

“I knew that everything I did you would’ve done better.”

“And this fantasy somehow made you afraid to sleep beside me? What do you think I’m gonna do, ram a rook down your throat while you’re unconscious?”

“I think you’re going to win.”

“Against…?”

“Me. Against me, Beth.” He looks tired. It must be after midnight now, but he’s not _that_ kind of tired, more like wearied by that internal war of his. She feels like the medical reinforcements, only she doesn’t know whether she’s tending the wound or carting him off to a shallow grave.

“I… did that already.”

“No, not with this, because I was holding out!” Benny pushes his hair back in irritation. “I was just going to train you. I was supposed to be getting in your head, not the other way around.”

Beth makes a scoffing noise and he narrows his eyes from where he’s leaning forward, about to break into a pace.

“I mean,” she tells the look he’s wearing, giving up on the warmth of recent sleep to sit up in his bed, “you weren’t just going to train me. You could’ve given me tips over the phone. You could’ve lent me a _book_.”

“It wouldn’t have been enough,” he argues.

“For whom?”

Beth sees him stop himself before he can respond. He shakes a finger at her, like she’s made some incorrect leap of understanding. She really doesn’t think she has. She crosses her arms.

“Ok,” he blurts when her stubborn posture’s worn him down, “I knew what I was doing when I asked you to come stay with me.”

“Did you?”

“Who are you, Jiminy Cricket? Quit trying to get me to examine my conscience.”

“There’s nothing wrong with inviting me here,” she points out with a shrug, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. “I wanted to come.”

“Yeah, I know,” Benny says harshly. “You wanted to come. You liked the idea. You liked my hair.”

“Still do.”

He shuts up and looks at her. Experiencing his silence, she feels unprepared as she hasn’t done since scrutinizing him in Vegas, panicking over his childhood triumphs to her mother’s patient ear.

“Really?”

“Would I lie to you, Benny?”

Nodding to himself, he lowers his gaze and gets into bed beside her. She doesn’t change her position, but she relaxes her arms, and when he touches her shoulder gently, lets them fall and twists towards him. Benny leans in and kisses her. His hand skims from her shoulder to the back of her neck and she shivers.

Beth doesn’t have to give him the ‘now or never’ that she gave Harry after their first kiss, or that Mr. Shaibel gave her when he offered to teach her to play chess—Benny’s decisive. She likes that. She can feel it in the way his lips begin to work more firmly against hers after an initial feeling-out period. What a far cry from what she’s had before. Tim, who wanted to masturbate to Dostoevsky in the original Russian, or whatever the hell he planned to do with his conversational language skills, kissed like somebody put him up to it, like he wasn’t actually sure he wanted to be kissing her at all, just that they happened to be in the same place and might as well. Harry was too tender, already half-heartbroken the moment he rose from his chair to touch his lips to hers. Melancholy in love. If there’s anybody suited to Russian literature, Beth has a feeling it’s Harry Beltik. Benny’s just… free of all that. Plus, he’s an objectively better kisser, no plainer way to put it.

“I think I was dreaming about you,” she breathes the first time Benny pulls back a little.

“You _think_? Great. I was forgettable.”

“That’s not it,” Beth says with a smile, very conscious of the way she’s stroking her fingers through his hair. “I just mean that this…” She tips her head and brushes her mouth across his. “…was starting to remind me.”

“Oh. It was _that_ sort of dream.”

He smiles knowingly and angles to kiss her with even more resolution, forcing a surprised moan out of her. She lets him tip her back onto the pillow, his hands in her hair now, his groin at her hip. She can feel him swell as he shifts. Already, he’s more coordinated than her stoned classmate, less painfully apologetic than Harry.

_God_ , she thinks suddenly, _if this doesn’t go well, we are so fucked_. It’s not as though she can leave while he sleeps and head home. Home is a full day’s drive from here and she and Benny have an arrangement for him to train her until Paris. After boasting about his own maturity (at least, in comparison to Harry) over beers, he probably wouldn’t have much respect for her making the immature choice to run away. Then again, Beth hung around Tim’s apartment for days after their supremely underwhelming encounter, and she _lived_ with Harry, for fuck’s sake. She can do this, face this. She can quit mapping out scenarios in her mind and enjoy the fact that Benny’s finally given in. To her. Beth smiles against his mouth, hand sliding over his t-shirt to draw him closer.

She tilts a little his way and he tilts a little hers; their hips press together and her pulse jumps at the twitch of his erection through the cotton of their pajama bottoms. When her eyelids flicker up, she finds his doing the same. She’s never seen his face flushed like this before. Cupping his cheek, her cool hand steals some of that warmth, but he doesn’t protest—if anything, he likes it, leaning in, nudging his hips forward. Beth isn’t going to wait around to be the Ginger to his Fred like she did in bed with Tim, ceding the lead. She and Benny are evenly matched, hopefully not just on a chessboard, so she nudges back. In a quick motion, he grabs her thigh and tugs it up to his hip. His head falls back and he pulls her on top of him.

Embarrassingly, Beth gasps a breath at being abruptly seated astride Benny’s erection. Benny’s… cock. The memory of Jolene attempting to explain the appendage to her returns and her mouth quavers to hold in a laugh. Below her, Benny stares like she’s nuts.

“You ok?”

“Yes,” Beth assures him.

“You done this before?”

It takes her a moment to realize he means something broader than straddling someone in bed. (She’s always been pinned on her back, trying to figure out why people do this for fun, as she accommodated a man’s self-serving thrusts.) She almost nods before understanding that Benny means sex generally.

“Yes.”

He looks dubious, though the erection beneath her doesn’t flag. She rolls her lips together and tries to stay very still and focus on Benny’s doubt until they clear this up.

“It’s alright if you haven’t…” he begins.

“I have,” she says shortly.

Because he looks like he’s going to argue, Beth groans in frustration and swings her leg to climb off of him, sitting at his side and jerking the front of his untied pajamas down. Now, the blankets aren’t even close to covering them. She assumes his knees are still warm.

“Whoa, Beth, hey, if I made you feel like you have something to prove…”

She considers that a second, then says, “Only since the first time we talked and you called me ‘little girl.’”

“What a time to be reminded.”

She tips her head in ironic acknowledgement and goes back to analyzing the situation in front of her. In theory, she gets it. She never felt inclined to try it out on Harry or Tim, but she knows more now than she learned from Jolene’s sketchy description of the act, mostly from overhearing the whispers of Nice Girls at their lockers in high school. Margaret Neil could write the fucking book on blowjobs from the pointers she doled out to her underlings with simpering superiority.

Beth begins by resting her hand on Benny’s bare hip. He grabs her shoulder. She frowns at him.

“I know I didn’t completely get it out,” he says, “because you are making it slightly difficult to finish a sentence, but if you really do feel that way, we don’t have to do this.”

“‘We’? Were you planning to join me?” She motions to his cock, which appears to have more confidence in an impending resolution than his mouth does.

When he doesn’t respond, she grips his length. Warm. _This_ she’s done.

“What are you gonna do?” rushes from his mouth. Beth blinks and meets his eye.

“You play speed chess for money,” she reminds him. “You should know what taking a gamble looks like.”

To keep pace with her words, she cavalierly dips her head and sucks him between her lips. That was a lot of dithering, Beth thinks, for someone who quickly folds his arm under his head to prop himself up, the better to watch her. She doesn’t have any pity for his choked protest when she sits up a minute to set something straight.

“I haven’t done _this_ before,” she clarifies.

“So, my assumption was technically correct.” Boy, he’s trying hard not to look disheveled, despite his pants down around his thighs. The black t-shirt keeps him presentable from the waist up.

“Do you want to debate this until I get annoyed with you?”

Benny’s gaze vaults from her face to his lap; her fingers encircle the base of his cock and the head shines with her saliva.

“I see your point,” he allows.

“Good.”

With that said, Beth continues. Going down too far makes her tense up (possibly a remnant of that crack about stuffing a chess piece down his throat), but she figures out she can use her hand to cover the extra territory. She’s not hearing any complaints as she pumps him in a tight fist, just Benny’s harsh breathing. He’s watching her—god, _exactly_ the way he does when they play. She switches from sucking to tonguing over his head and, all of a sudden, his free hand’s on the back of her head, stroking up and down her hair. And he’s moaning. She’d smile if she could.

“Ok, quick study,” Benny gasps, easing her up by the shoulders a short time later. “There’s no state title for that.”

“I wasn’t done,” she says calmly. It feels nice to be calm, in contrast to a man who has all the composure of an amateur high-flying acrobat.

“It’s better for you to be done before _I’m_ done.”

He kicks his way out of the pajama bottoms and hauls her horizontal as she laughs at his haste. Benny laughs too; it seems to sneak up on him, like a sneeze. All it takes to change the mood again is her sliding her fingers up his stomach under his t-shirt. He closes his eyes at, presumably, the pleasure of her hands against his skin, and it makes her heart feel as though it’s riding a jerky, broken elevator. It’s straining, it’s shaking, it’s going into freefall before stabilizing as Benny plants his mouth on hers.

“ _Beth_ ,” he implores quietly against her lips.

He has his hand on her ribs, right below her breast. She pushes it over to the line of buttons down the front of her pajama top. They share a look. Benny starts at the bottom, Beth starts at the top. Then it’s his shirt, her pants, a scattering of clothing around the bed that looks like the upstairs sales floor of Ben Snyder’s when nobody’s been up to tidy for a while. Finally, he pulls her naked body flush to his and she takes a quick breath. Benny Watts. Two years ago, in Las Vegas, she was equal parts in awe of his talent and totally enraged by him using that talent to beat her. Now, she’s slipping a hand between them to rub casually at his erection and hoping he can’t see her blush when he very straightforwardly asks if he can take her from behind. He vows, unprompted, that it’s not some power thing, nothing about seeing her on her hands and knees, he just wants to do something with her that he’s willing to bet she’s never done. This strikes her as both sweet and chest-poundingly possessive. But sweet—that wins out.

Before they can get to that, his hair’s in her face as he kisses hungrily down her neck. She thinks he’s maybe still hesitant to scare her off and _that’s_ why his hands are moving so slowly over her skin, until she accepts that he’s just mesmerized himself with touching her. Panting against the base of her throat, he cups her breasts in both hands. Beth’s thighs squirm as her body gets readier than either of her previous sexual partners have inspired it to be. She calls softly to him now as his hands knead.

“Benny?”

In response, he insinuates his thigh between hers and grazes the fingers of one hand down her stomach. He lifts his head and holds her eyes. Chest heaving, she swallows at finding his expression far from dazed or dopey—he looks like he’s about to rip her to shreds, and he traces his fingers between her legs with the lightest caress. Beth exhales shakily as his fingertips skate through her wetness, outlining her shape a few times before his contact gains pressure. Her hand shoots out to grip his arm and Benny just stares back at her until she nods. This is good. She isn’t stopping him.

The other guys… they fumbled with her. Benny touches her purposefully. He’s playing in an experienced way a sequence that other players were only trying to replicate from a book. As he would with a game of chess, he’s tailoring his approach to her, moving when she moves, reacting in a dozen subtle ways. When she’s shaking, he tucks two fingers inside her and she bears down on them with a groan. Her hand tenses and she claws her nails down his arm. She can feel the hairs standing on end.

“I don’t… I don’t want to wait any longer,” Beth says, licking the sweat from her upper lip. The bed’s plenty warm now, though the blankets are on the floor.

“Thank god. I wouldn’t have left you hanging, but, you know.”

“Got it.”

Benny withdraws his hand, kisses her deeply, and pulls her up onto her knees with him. His cock pulses against her abdomen. His hands are hot on her back. Shuffling backwards, he makes room for Beth to bend over in front of him, and she does. She feels animal with the sheet beneath her palms. If her having sex at all made her mother blush, she certainly would never have hinted to Alma about this. This is for her and Benny, and for her to carry to Paris with her to stave off feeling intimidated by Borgov. _I did_ that, Beth will think, _and I wasn’t afraid_.

“I, uh…” he begins. She turns to look back at him and witnesses how he drags his gaze along her back to her face. “I don’t have a condom.” With anticipatory energy, he scraps his fingers through his hair. “I haven’t been home in a while and then, when I brought you, well… you know I’ve been trying _not_ to end up here.”

“Thanks.”

He seems to get that her flat answer was meant jokingly.

“So, I purposely didn’t stock up.”

“I see.”

Beth contemplates this information. Ultimately, with the same attitude with which she met Annette Packer’s gift of a sanitary pad, she bluffs. She gestures for Benny to proceed. Claims she knows what she’s doing and that it’ll be fine. There’s no way this should convince him, but it does. She blames him for making them wait so long that any additional delay feels intolerable. They will not adjourn and pick this up tomorrow.

She can hear him breathing as he presses against, then into, her. The soft pant is something she’ll probably lose the memory of later, but in the moment, she’s more aware of his respiration than her own. Sounds continue to leave him as he eases in and out of her, farther each time. It takes a while for Beth to enjoy this position more than the usual lackluster experience of lying on her back. She just doesn’t get it, and wonders if Benny wasn’t honest when he said it had nothing to do with power. Then, he speeds up, hips colliding with her backside, and everything tingles pleasantly. The feeling reminds her of the wooziness of her first day of ‘vitamins’ at Methuen; she folds forward further, resting her head on her arms. Only this sensation isn’t like that dizzy distortion, where she felt as though she were stumbling around, trying to find her own brain in a patch of fog. _This_ comes with focus, and the center of that is Benny’s cock rubbing swiftly through her. She moans and her eyes squeeze shut. His bedroom wall wasn’t much to look at anyway.

His hands smooth over her hips, then one comes around to her stomach. It slips lower and the bullseye of her bliss splits in half as his fingers fondle just clear of where he’s pistoning in and out in long strokes.

“ _Benny_ ,” Beth murmurs, palms damp as her fingers curl into the sheet. She shakes her head from side to side instinctively, attempting to master the building ecstasy. _She_ controls feeling out of control—choosing the green pills, or too many bottles of beer, or too many swallows of whiskey, or too many glugs straight from the wine bottle. When she lets go, it’s by her own hand. She isn’t used to this. She didn’t even expect it, after Harry and Tim.

Rising to her elbows, then back onto her hands, she shoves against him, not just taking Benny’s thrusts, but reacting, even as uncontrollable whimpers leave her mouth. Fuck, this buzz is nice. Maybe it’s Benny as well as the position. Maybe it’d be just as good with him if she were on her back, so good that she’d gaze up at his ceiling and watch the chessboard materialize as he glided forward and back. Her pleasure spikes and she slaps a hand over his, flattening it against her and grinding on his fingers.

“It’s what you wanted,” Benny mumbles in a voice that’s gruff and strained. The fingers of his other hand flex on her hip. “You win, Beth.”

The pleasure spikes again and her knees go wobbly as the orgasm rampages through her. She’s sinking, but he’s holding her up, groaning as his hips rock harder, then slow as he exhales in a gust that reaches her bare back.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he breathes. “I’m gonna have to go out and get condoms.”

Beth’s in a state of thoroughly satisfied shock as they collapse together. Benny grabs for the top sheet and draws it up before plastering his chest to her back, trapping their heat. They’re sweaty, sticky, and struggling to catch their breath. His heart’s pounding against her.

She inhales enough to speak and decides, “ _That’s_ what it’s supposed to feel like.”


End file.
